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This is my personal vision for an event called “Optimistic Futures” to explore what we could be aiming for and figure out the possible roles for government in future.

Technology is both an enabler and a disruptor in our lives. It has ushered in an age of surplus, with decentralised systems enabled by highly empowered global citizens, all creating increasing complexity. It is imperative that we transition into a more open, collaborative, resilient and digitally enabled society that can respond exponentially to exponential change whilst empowering all our people to thrive. We have the means now by which to overcome our greatest challenges including poverty, hunger, inequity and shifting job markets but we must be bold in collectively designing a better future, otherwise we may unintentionally reinvent past paradigms and inequities with shiny new things.

Technology is only as useful as it affects actual people, so my vision starts, perhaps surprisingly for some, with people. After all, if people suffer, the system suffers, so the well being of people is the first and foremost priority for any sustainable vision. But we also need to look at what all sectors and communities across society need and what part they can play:

People: I dream of a future where the uniqueness of local communities, cultures and individuals is amplified, where diversity is embraced as a strength, and where all people are empowered with the skills, capacity and confidence to thrive locally and internationally. A future where everyone shares in the benefits and opportunities of a modern, digital and surplus society/economy with resilience, and where everyone can meaningfully contribute to the future of work, local communities and the national/global good.

Public sectors: I dream of strong, independent, bold and highly accountable public sectors that lead, inform, collaborate, engage meaningfully and are effective enablers for society and the economy. A future where we invest as much time and effort on transformational digital public infrastructure and skills as we do on other public infrastructure like roads, health and traditional education, so that we can all build on top of government as a platform. Where everyone can have confidence in government as a stabilising force of integrity that provides a minimum quality of life upon which everyone can thrive.

The media: I dream of a highly effective fourth estate which is motivated systemically with resilient business models that incentivise behaviours to both serve the public and hold power to account, especially as “news” is also arguably becoming exponential. Actionable accountability that doesn’t rely on the linearity and personal incentives of individuals to respond will be critical with the changing pace of news and with more decisions being made by machines.

Private, academic and non-profit sectors: I dream of a future where all sectors can more freely innovate, share, adapt and succeed whilst contributing meaningfully to the public good and being accountable to the communities affected by decisions and actions. I also see a role for academic institutions in particular, given their systemic motivation for high veracity outcomes without being attached to one side, as playing a role in how national/government actions are measured, planned, tested and monitored over time.

Finally, I dream of a world where countries are not celebrated for being just “digital nations” but rather are engaged in a race to the top in using technology to improve the lives of all people and to establish truly collaborative democracies where people can meaningfully participate in the shaping the optimistic and inclusive futures.

Technology is a means, not an ends, so we need to use technology to both proactively invent the future we need (thank you Alan Kay) and to be resilient to change including emerging tech and trends.

Let me share a few specific optimistic predictions for 2070:

Automation will help us redesign our work expectations. We will have a 10-20 hour work week supported by machines, freeing up time for family, education, civic duties and innovation. People will have less pressure to simply survive and will have more capacity to thrive (this is a common theme, but something I see as critical).

3D printing of synthetic foods and nanotechnology to deconstruct and reconstruct molecular materials will address hunger, access to medicine, clothes and goods, and community hubs (like libraries) will become even more important as distribution, education and social hubs, with drones and other aerial travel employed for those who can’t travel. Exoskeletons will replace scooters

With rocket travel normalised, and only an hour to get anywhere on the planet, nations will see competitive citizenships where countries focus on the best quality of life to attract and retain people, rather than largely just trying to attract and retain companies as we do today. We will also likely see the emergence of more powerful transnational communities that have nationhood status to represent the aspects of people’s lives that are not geopolitically bound.

The public service has highly professional, empathetic and accountable multi-disciplinary experts on responsive collaborative policy, digital legislation, societal modeling, identifying necessary public digital infrastructure for investment, and well controlled but openly available data, rules and transactional functions of government to enable dynamic and third party services across myriad channels, provided to people based on their needs but under their control. We will also have a large number of citizens working 1 or 2 days a week in paid civic duties on areas where they have passion, skills or experience to contribute.

The paralympics will become the main game, as it were, with no limits on human augmentation. We will do the 100m sprint with rockets, judo with cyborgs, rock climbing with tentacles. We have access to medical capabilities to address any form of disease or discomfort but we don’t use the technologies to just comply to a normative view of a human. People are free to choose their form and we culturally value diversity and experimentation as critical attributes of a modern adaptable community.

I’ve only been living in New Zealand a short time but I’ve been delighted and inspired by what I’ve learned from kiwi and Māori cultures, so I’d like to share a locally inspired analogy.

Technology is on one hand, just a waka (canoe), a vehicle for change. We all have a part to play in the journey and in deciding where we want to go. On the other hand, technology is also the winds, the storms, the thunder, and we have to continually work to understand and respond to emerging technologies and trends so we stay safely on course. It will take collaboration and working towards common goals if we are to chart a better future for all.

At DrupalDownunder some years back, the wonderful Erica Bramham named her talk "All node, no code". Nodes were the fundamental building blocks in Drupal, they were like single drops of content. These days though, it's all about entities.

But hang on a minute, I'm using lots of buzz words, and worse, I'm using words that mean different things in different contexts. Jargon is one of the first hurdles you need to jump to understand the diverse worlds of the web. People who grow up multi-lingual learn that the meanings of words is somewhat arbitrary. They learn the same thing has different names. This is true for the web too. So the first thing to know about Site Building, is it means different things to different people.

To me, it means being able to build a website with out knowing how to code. I also believe it means I can build a website without having to set up my own development environment. I know people who vehemently disagree with me about this. But that's ok. This is my blog, and these are my rules.

So - this is a post about site building, using SimplyTest.Me and Drupal 8 out of the box.

Andrew Pam will demonstrate how to install LineageOS, previously known as CyanogenMod and based on the Android Open Source Project, on tablets and phones. Feel free to bring your own tablets and phones and have a go, but please ensure you back them up if there is anything you still need stored on them!

The modern Olympic games were started by Frenchman Henri de Baillot-Latour to promote international understanding. The first games of the modern era were held in 1896 in Athens, Greece. Australia has competed in all the Olympic games of the modern era, although our participation in the first one was almost by chance. Of course, the […]

Australia Day and its commemoration on 26 January, has long been a controversial topic. This year has seen calls once again for the date to be changed. Similar calls have been made for a long time. As early as 1938, Aboriginal civil rights leaders declared a “Day of Mourning” to highlight issues in the Aboriginal […]

I just bought a Thinkpad X1 Carbon to replace my Thinkpad X301 [1]. It cost me $289 with free shipping from an eBay merchant which is a great deal, a new battery for the Thinkpad X301 would have cost about $100.

It seems that laptops aren’t depreciating in value as much as they used to. Grays Online used to reliably have refurbished Thinkpads with manufacturer’s warranty selling for about $300. Now they only have IdeaPads (a cheaper low-end line from Lenovo) at good prices, admittedly $100 to $200 for an IdeaPad is a very nice deal if you want a cheap laptop and don’t need something too powerful. But if you want something for doing software development on the go then you are looking at well in excess of $400. So I ended up buying a second-hand system from an eBay merchant.

Thinkpads have traditionally had the best keyboards, but they are losing that advantage. This system has a keyboard that feels like an Apple laptop keyboard not like a traditional Thinkpad. It still has the Trackpoint which is a major feature if you like it (I do). The biggest downside is that they rearranged the keys. The PgUp/PgDn keys are now by the arrow keys, this could end up being useful if you like the SHIFT-PgUp/SHIFT-PgDn combinations used in the Linux VC and some Xterms like Konsole. But I like to keep my keys by the home keys and I can’t do that unless I use the little finger of my right hand for PgUp/PgDn. They also moved the Home, End, and Delete keys which is really annoying. It’s not just that the positions are different to previous Thinkpads (including X series like the X301), they are different to desktop keyboards. So every time I move between my Thinkpad and a desktop system I need to change key usage.

Did Lenovo not consider that touch typists might use their products?

The keyboard moved the PrtSc key, and lacks ScrLk and Pause keys, but I hardly ever use the PrtSc key, and never use the other 2. The lack of those keys would only be of interest to people who have mapped them to useful functions and people who actually use PrtSc. It’s impractical to have a key as annoying to accidentally press as PrtSc between the Ctrl and Alt keys.

One significant benefit of the keyboard in this Thinkpad is that it has a backlight instead of having a light on the top of the screen that shines on the keyboard. It might work better than the light above the keyboard and looks much cooler! As an aside I discovered that my Thinkpad X301 has a light above the keyboard, but the key combination to activate it sometimes needs to be pressed several times.

Display

X1 Carbon 1600*900
T420 1600*900
T61 1680*1050
X301 1440*900

Above are the screen resolutions for all my Thinkpads of the last 8 years. The X301 is an anomaly as I got it from a rubbish pile and it was significantly older than Thinkpads usually are when I get them. It’s a bit disappointing that laptop screen resolution isn’t increasing much over the years. I know some people have laptops with resolutions as high as 2560*1600 (as high as a high end phone) it seems that most laptops are below phone resolution.

Kogan is currently selling the Agora 8+ phone new for $239, including postage that would still be cheaper than the $289 I paid for this Thinkpad. There’s no reason why new phones should have lower prices and higher screen resolutions than second-hand laptops. The Thinkpad is designed to be a high-end brand, other brands like IdeaPad are for low end devices. Really 1600*900 is a low-end resolution by today’s standards, 1920*1080 should be the minimum for high-end systems. Now I could have bought one of the X series models with a higher screen resolution, but most of them have the lower resolution and hunting for a second hand system with the rare high resolution screen would mean missing the best prices.

I wonder if there’s an Android app to make a phone run as a second monitor for a Linux laptop, that way you could use a high resolution phone screen to display data from a laptop.

This display is unreasonably bright by default. So bright it hurt my eyes. The xbacklight program doesn’t support my display but the command “xrandr –output LVDS-1 –brightness 0.4” sets the brightness to 40%. The Fn key combination to set brightness doesn’t work. Below a brightness of about 70% the screen looks grainy.

General

This Thinkpad has a 180G SSD that supports contiguous reads at 500MB/s. It has 8G of RAM which is the minimum for a usable desktop system nowadays and while not really fast the CPU is fast enough. Generally this is a nice system.

It doesn’t have an Ethernet port which is really annoying. Now I have to pack a USB Ethernet device whenever I go anywhere. It also has mini-DisplayPort as the only video connector, as that is almost never available at a conference venue (VGA and HDMI are the common ones) I’ll have to pack an adaptor when I give a lecture. It also only has 2 USB ports, the X301 has 3. I know that not having HDMI, VGA, and Ethernet ports allows designing a thinner laptop. But I would be happier with a slightly thicker laptop that has more connectivity options. The Thinkpad X301 has about the same mass and is only slightly thicker and has all those ports. I blame Apple for starting this trend of laptops lacking IO options.

This might be the last laptop I own that doesn’t have USB-C. Currently not having USB-C is not a big deal, but devices other than phones supporting it will probably be released soon and fast phone charging from a laptop would be a good feature to have.

This laptop has no removable battery. I don’t know if it will be practical to replace the battery if the old one wears out. But given that replacing the battery may be more than the laptop is worth this isn’t a serious issue. One significant issue is that there’s no option to buy a second battery if I need to have it run without mains power for a significant amount of time. When I was travelling between Australia and Europe often I used to pack a second battery so I could spend twice as much time coding on the plane. I know it’s an engineering trade-off, but they did it with the X301 and could have done it again with this model.

Conclusion

This isn’t a great laptop. The X1 Carbon is described as a flagship for the Thinkpad brand and the display is letting down the image of the brand. The CPU is a little disappointing, but it’s a trade-off that I can deal with.

The keyboard is really annoying and will continue to annoy me for as long as I own it. The X301 managed to fit a better keyboard layout into the same space, there’s no reason that they couldn’t have done the same with the X1 Carbon.

I didn’t know that SetErrorMode(SEM_NOALIGNMENTFAULTEXCEPT) was a thing, until I wrote a bad test that wouldn’t crash.

Digging into it, I found that a movaps instruction was being rewritten as movups, which was a thoroughly confusing thing to see.

The one clue I had was that a fault due to an unaligned load had been observed in non-test code, but did not reproduce when written as a test using the google-test framework. A short hunt later (including a failed attempt at writing a small repro case), I found an explanation: google test suppresses this class of failure.

The code below will successfully demonstrate the behavior, printing out the SIMD load instruction before and after calling the function with an unaligned pointer.

Well, most of our schools are back, or about to start the new year. Did you know that there are schools using OpenSTEM materials in every state and territory of Australia? Our wide range of resources, especially those on Australian history, give detailed information about the history of all our states and territories. We pride […]

Package upgrades across an OpenStack cloud do
not always happen at the same time. In most cases they may happen within an
hour or so across your cloud but for a variety reasons, some upgrades may be
applied inconsistently, delayed or blocked on some servers.

As these packages may be rolling out a much needed patch or perhaps carrying
a bug, you may wish to know which services are impacted in fairly short order.

If your OpenStack cloud is running Ubuntu and
managed by Juju and MAAS, here's
where juju run can come to the rescue.

For example, perhaps there's an update to the
Corosync library
libcpg4
and you wish to know which of your HA clusters have what version installed.

Saturday, January 27, 2018 - 09:57I love free software, but sometimes, I feel, that free software does not love me.
Why is it so hard to use? Why is it still so buggy? Why do the things I can do simply with other tools, take so much effort? Why is the documentation so inscrutable? Why have all the config settings been removed from the GUI? Why does this HowTo assume I can find a config file, and edit it with VI? Do I have to learn to use VI before I can stop my window manager getting in the way of the application I’m trying to use?
Tis a mystery. Or is it?
It’s fair to say, that the Free Software community is still largely made up of blokes, who are software developers. The idea that “user centered design” is a “Good Thing” is not evenly distributed. In fact, some seem to think it’s not a good thing at all, “patches welcome” they say, “go fix it yourself”.
The web community on the other hand, has discovered that the key to their success is understanding and meeting the needs of the people who use their software. Ideological purity is great, but enabling people to meet their objectives, is better.
As technologists, we get excited by technology. Of course we do! Technology is modern magic. And we are wizards. It’s wonderful. But the people who use our software are not necessarily interested in the tech itself, they probably just want to use it to get something done. They probably don’t even care what language it’s written in.
Let’s say a customer walks into a hardware store and says they want a drill. Or perhaps they walk in and stand in front of a shelf simply contemplating a dizzying array of drills, drill bits and other accessories. Which one is right for the job they wonder. Should I get a cordless one? Will I really need diamond tipped drill bits?
There's a technique called the 5 Why's that's useful to get under the surface of a requirement. The idea is, you keep asking why until you uncover the real reason for a request, need, feature or widget. For example, we could ask this customer...
Why do you want this drill? To drill a hole.
Why? To hang a picture on my wall.
Why? To be able to share and enjoy this amazing photo from my recent holiday.
So we discover our customer did not, in fact, want a drill. Our customer wanted to express something about their identity by decorating their home. So telling them all about the voltage of the drill, and the huge range of drill bits available, may have helped them choose the right drill for the job, but if we stop to understand the job in the first place, we’re more likely to be able to help that person get what they need to get their job done.
User stories are one way we can explore the “Why” behind the software we build. Check out my talk from the Developers Developers miniconf at linux.conf.au on Monday “Turning stories, into software.”